The Summit Blog

Want to enrich your business day with solid advice you can apply right away? Looking to be inspired? Want to warm up the old thinking cap so you can focus on what’s important? Check out The Summit Blog…

It is possible that the first mind change that has to happen is yours. Perhaps they are not wrong and you are not right. Perhaps there is no wrong or right, but just different perspectives on the issue. Yours is the only mind over which you have control, so if things aren’t working as well as you would like them to, that’s the best place to start.

In a world where electronic transactions have surpassed the exchange of dollar bills and even checks in some industries, cash is still king. It still rules your business, so you’ll fare better if you take steps to make cash your friend.

In the process of coaching for peak performance, one of the processes our clients go through is a personal self-assessment. It covers multiple dimensions, including career/financial, social life, mental development, physical, family, and ethics and beliefs. This is not done with an overlay of a standard of what “should” be, but rather with the client’s own values driving the evaluation. We almost always wind up in a discussion about whether it is better to strengthen your strengths, or fix your weaknesses.

At its foundation – what do you communicate about, to whom, by what channel, and how often do you do so? Are you achieving the results that you want to achieve? Communication is blocking and tackling in running an organization. The problem is that some people think that it happens automatically and organically. That isn’t the case if you want to manage your communication processes within the context of your strategic intent.

Feeling a bit unfocused lately? Lost your juice, your drive, for your work - or in your personal life? If you haven't already engineered the life of your dreams, no matter your age, no matter your block on the organizational chart - you may need a BHAG. Jerry Porras...

You might see the need for an under-performing employee to be “fixed,” but pulling a coaching style out of your toolkit does not have the same impact as it does to engage a business/personal coach. Developmental coaching can be a very effective method to help someone make breakthroughs in the very frame of reference from which they are operating.

When you try to have everything at once you dilute your energy. You start to race frantically from one spinning plate to the next, trying to prevent each in turn from falling to the ground. Your attention is fractured, and because you are not focused you don’t see the opportunities that are right in front of you, hidden in plain view. It’s a blur. When you insist on having everything at once you over-commit, overspend, overeat, and under-sleep.

Continuous talent management and the development of an invigorating work climate – these are your two key strategies to keep your top performers on board to help you grow. Employee engagement and employee development might sound like items on “Someday Isle”, things that will be nice to work on when you have time. But they are strategically important to your business’s future, and they won’t happen overnight.

If you don’t change anything nothing will change. Is that what you really want? Really? There are solutions to the vast majority of obstacles. It’s a matter of weighing the potential value against the investment you need to make to get there. If there is no good time, then it means that there is no bad time either. All times are equally bad. So do it now. That THING is waiting.

This is not to say that one day workshops or retreats don’t have a valid place in your overall staff development strategy. What’s important is to understand their role as well as their limitations. They can raise awareness, inform, inspire, provide variety, create shared history among team members, or serve as booster shots – but what they will NOT reliably do is change behavior in a sustainable way.

If you want to be intentional about aligning your business around a set of values, you need to be evaluating the language that is being used every day, in meetings, in your marketing, and in your direct interaction with customers.

Every action has consequences, some you expect and some you never intended. Are you a reactor, creating unintended consequences because you don’t stop to think first? Or or you a postponer, who allows consequences to unfold because of unwillingness to act?

It's not common that businesses have only one goal, and it's not common that any business has only one problem, or only one opportunity that it has not yet pursued. Once you realize that you have work to do to shore things up, or to scale things up, do you know where...

It is sometimes easy to become drawn into the day to day crises and production needs of your business. But as the leader it is important to keep your eye on the middle distance and on the horizon. When you know clearly what success looks like, and measure your company’s progress along the way, you can maintain your focus in the place it’s of highest value to the business. Moreover, you can make better decisions about how you can best allocate your resources toward the future of your choice.

If you are wondering whether to stay out of the fray or to step into it, consider whether it is really about the win, the point you “score” in the discussion. That is probably not a sound reason to take the associated risk. But if there are issues of the fundamentals, of vision, of values – these may be issues about which it would be risky NOT to speak up.